MEET THE LONDON UNDERTAKER:
An Interview With Brian
Parsons
Brian Parsons is a funeral director and training consultant
to funeral directors, trading under the name Funeral Training Service London.
He trains new funeral directors and works to enhance skills of existing funeral
directors. Brian researches, lectures and writes about the British funeral
industry, particularly regarding the latter part of the 19th century
up to the present day.
I was delighted to sit with Brian and pose a few questions.
When did you know you wanted to be an undertaker?
I was about fourteen or fifteen when I got to know a
cemetery superintendent and he introduced me to a funeral director. I’d never
been to a funeral at that point, but then I went to a neighbor’s funeral and
was very intrigued about it all. There was a hidden world that worked
seamlessly. It was all going on somewhere, but you weren’t exposed to anything,
and didn’t see anything apart from big vehicles, people in black doing certain
tasks, and nobody would say much about it.
The intrigue has never ceased. Because when I left school at
sixteen, I started a three-year apprenticeship scheme for a funeral directing
firm. I began in the workshop finishing coffins.
Coffins would be brought in ready-made, but empty, so you
had to learn how to line them and put the handles on, they were all different.
Some of them had the most beautiful linings. There was quite a range of caskets
because the firm I looked after held many Travellers’ funerals and they would always
buy the best casket available. They wanted the most expensive caskets in the
range and they wanted the best for the person who died. This was in no way the
undertaker encouraging people to spend more money; this was the family saying,
‘this is what we want, this is what we do’.
It’s a client led interaction. To quote a cliché, it’s the
ultimate stress purchase. The funeral director starts off on a bad foot because
people are distressed and they’re purchasing something they don’t want to pay
money for because they don’t want people to die… let alone be landed with a
£6,000 bill for the funeral. It’s a transaction that the vast majority of
people don’t want to enter, but have to. At the same time, the funeral director
takes instruction. We offer a huge range of options to get from point A, when
the person has died, to point B, when the person is laid to rest. There’s a
huge amount that can happen in those days, weeks, sometimes months between the
two. There are no rules - we can keep a body as long as necessary.
I didn’t do the second year of training because I wasn’t
particularly interested in the stone and monument side of it. I went straight
on to the funeral directing side and at the same time I trained as an embalmer.
Within a two-year period I did quite a bit of training and began funeral
arranging.
It was a learning curve. It was one thing to read about the
possible ways people might react to a death, and another to actually interpret
what was happening. I learned to
tread carefully, negotiate tactfully, to use the right words, particularly when
there is a dispute within the family, or when there is a very tragic
circumstance. It’s an art, it’s not a science, and you can’t always get it
right. Sometimes you’re left in situations where you can’t win.
Someone once said that a funeral director is a bit like a
meteorologist in that the meteorologist gets blamed for bad weather and we get
blamed for the loss.
How long have you been an undertaker and in which aspect
of the business are you most involved?
I’ve been an undertaker since 1982. Now I attend to training
needs and spend quite a bit of time looking after staff, but I still get
involved with undertaking.
I do a great deal of interviewing. We’ve become good at
weeding out people who think they might be good at the job, but maybe their
reasons or motivation for doing the job is not in line with our expectations.
Maybe they want to work as a funeral director to in some way resolve the
aspects of their own loss, particularly if they’ve been recently bereaved. The
last thing we want is for people to get emotionally involved in someone’s loss.
We don’t know the client we’re dealing with. They’re not engaging us to become
counsellors or to take the emotional strain on our shoulders. It’s the
practical, immediate necessities that have to be managed. The churn of staff is
probably not high as you might imagine.
What type of training is involved in the mentoring role?
Some training can be delivered in a classroom setting, such
as telling people about recent changes to legislation and how that impacts upon
the funeral arrangements that they will be carrying out, to training new
funeral directors where you have to carry out mock funeral arrangements with
them, or where you’re teaching them how to direct funerals. You go out and
shadow them. The art to teaching is to get them to actually do the work. You
give then the skills and then a push. You’re there in the background, but
they’re actually doing it, pointing them in the right directions and giving
them confidence to do it.
I asked Brian about the role of women in the undertaking
industry.
There have always been women working in the industry.
There’s a hidden area here because particularly in the smaller firms, and the
vast majority of firms in the 1950s were small, the husband would be the
funeral director and the wife would assist in an administrative capacity. And
we mustn’t forget that women have had a very important end-of-life role because
they assisted in the preparations for laying out the dead. There was a formal
network of layer-outers that existed in the community right up until the 1950s.
Someone would notify the local lady who would come along and wash the body and
prepare it and the reward was probably a fish and chips supper.
But as fewer deaths occurred at home and people died in
hospital, that tradition died away. The male paid-for carer in the form of a
funeral director really took over the responsibility for the dead.
There are a significant number of women embalmers. Probably
around 1/4 to 1/3 of the membership of British embalmers is female. Embalming
was a way of professionalizing the occupation by stating that we have an
effective scientifically based treatment that’s inexpensive and can be used to
halt any deterioration until time of the funeral. Women have a significant
place in funeral directing today. Not only do large corporations have equal
opportunity policies and some have had those in place for many years, but also
it’s recognized from thirty to forty years ago that women have a role as
funeral arrangers and conductors. There are many funeral arrangers and
conductors and women in senior management.
What would you say is the biggest misconception about
your job?
We have Charles Dickens to thank for the biggest
misconception of the undertaking business. It’s thought that we’re trading off
the vulnerable bereaved. Or maybe there were just too many undertakers in the
19th century and they were all trying to get work. Maybe some of
them did manipulate. But you can’t tar everybody with the same brush, and
particularly one from over one hundred and twenty years ago. Yet that seems to
be the legacy. It’s very easy for the press to accuse funeral directors of
manipulation, but the clients’ experience isn’t that. The large majority of the
clients know what the funeral is going to cost before it takes place, because
everyone gives an estimate. So there’s transparency there, and if the client
feels there isn’t enough money they can make adjustments to the cost of the
funeral.
It’s not in people’s interest to manipulate because in the
funeral directing business it could lead to bad debt and publicity. People may
jump too quickly to say we take advantage because we’re in a business with an
endless supply. We’re not here to ruin people, at the same time we have fixed
costs of running a business and they’re very high. Staff must be paid and
trained and investment has to be made in the business.
I asked Brian’s thoughts about Jessica Mitford's controversial views on the American undertaking trade.
Last year was fifty years since Jessica Mitford published The
American Way of Death and it was one of the
most successful books to be published. The Americans got their knickers in a
twist.
You’ve got to ask the question, from what perspective is
this being written and why is it being written? Mitford’s book came out in
1963; months after Ruth Mulvey Harmer
published a much better book called The High Cost of Dying. Mitford’s book eclipsed Harmers’, which was much
more rigorous in terms of research.
My theory was that Mitford had a problem with death. And the
problem was that she had lost both of her children. If you read her
autobiography, there is the briefest mention of the most horrendous death of
her 10-year-old child in a London road accident. This would splinter most
people. She endured this, and she also lost another child. This brings me back
to the funeral director being that convenient person who is on the firing line
after loss. I can’t take credit for this theory because Thomas Lynch, the great
American writer, poet and funeral director, pointed this out after she’d died.
Her work concerned America and also England. She writes in a
homely and endearing way about funerals in England in the 1960s. The most
disappointing aspect of her book was that she permitted it to be updated, which
appeared in the 1990s just after she died. What was produced was a poorly
researched and inadequate version of what was happening in the industry. At
that stage the industry was under predatory attack by an American organization
and wasn’t looked at in a sophisticated way. It sunk and was not rigorous
enough.
What is the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
Again, it’s a cliché, but looking after people in great
need, solving problems and difficulties. Death is a hugely complex area, not
only emotionally, but also the bureaucracy of death that has to be dealt with.
Thirty years ago when I started work, we never saw the
burial or cremation of the foetal remains, or a very young child under
twenty-four weeks. Today we’d see a funeral for such children. We also deal in
the funeral of body parts. A leg or a brain may be reunited with a person after
that person has been interred, or buried, or cremated. Perhaps the reason being
the body part was held back for examination.
How did you become interested in the history of
undertaking? And what inspired you to write your book, The Undertaker at
Work: 1900-1950?
I had a break in day-to-day embalming and went to do a
degree in business. I was very inspired by a lecture about the sociology of
business and in the first term the lecturer discussed how business and society
had changed. I found that fascinating and could see how the industrial
revolution and technology instigated change and impacted the work of the
funeral director. So I embarked on the research of the organization of funerals
and delved in to the history of undertaking.
I discovered that no one had really looked adequately at the
19th century. There’s one or two bits of writing and literature, but
there hasn’t been a really serious study of the 19th century undertaking
business and certainly no one had looked at the 20th century. That
became the principal focus because I was interested in how the organization of
funerals had changed, particularly from the war period to the 1990s.
The increase in cremation and the increase in people dying
away from the home, the introduction of embalming, the shift from the manual
craft of coffin-making to mass production, the introduction of the motorized
vehicle to replace the horse drawn hearse, the increased responsibility of the
undertaker, and the increase in transportation across the world - all these
factors came together as well as the business factors. Here was an industry
that was dominated by the small trader, the family business, yet this family
business was suffering because families were smaller, sons and daughters didn’t
want to go into the business. So what did they do? They sold them to realize
money for their retirement. That gave the organizations an opportunity to use a
centralized form of operations to manage funerals and costs and still provide a
service. It all came together and it needed codifying.
Many thanks to Brian whose new book The Undertaker at
Work: 1900-1950 is
now available here from his website.
Brian joins The Memento Moriatas for an evening of Tales of
Ritual and Remembrance at the Coffin Works in Birmingham on October 8. It
promises to be a special night in the Shroud Room of the former Victorian
coffin fittings factory where we three will present illustrated talks on all
things funereal. Tickets and more information here.
